Under the present mode of operation, many enterprises build and administer private SANs to store their digital information. Typically, the SAN is isolated from outside access to ensure that the stored information remains private. However, there is considerable expense and inefficiency associated with building and maintaining a private SAN. Other drawbacks exist.
Carrier networks and SSPs attempt to eliminate these drawbacks by offering shared storage networks. However, in order to be effective, any shared storage scheme should provide for separation of customer information to insure data integrity and privacy.
Existing systems achieve customer separation by implementing separate physical connections and separate physical storage devices for each customer. This solution can be costly, decrease operational simplification, and have other drawbacks.
Existing systems traditionally implement direct connection between servers and storage devices via SCSI or other direct point-to-point connections. The advent of Fibre Channel (FC) networking allows connections through a switched network or arbitrated loop. The FC structure includes addressing which is private within the domain of a single enterprise. However, one drawback of this approach is that no two devices are allowed to have the same address, also, there are no robust security mechanisms today that would completely protect one device from being accessed by any other. This leads to addressing conflicts and privacy issues if several enterprises share the network and infrastructure.
Some storage devices offer internal customer separation based on port and/or worldwide name. This, however, does not address the problem of sharing the network upstream of (including SAN switched network and carrier access network) the storage device. Some storage devices also offer internal storage virtualization, but then distribution of the customer data is limited to the capacity of that one storage device.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide a technique for shared data storage which overcomes the above-described inadequacies and shortcomings. More particularly, it would be desirable to provide a technique for avoiding addressing conflicts and providing greater privacy for each SAN customer in an efficient and cost effective manner.